Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

 It may not have been the most majestic sight I saw in Hawaii or the most picturesque, but the perseverance and unflinching courage of the green sea turtles flapping their flippers on the shore of Ho’okipa Beach to lay their eggs is surely among the greatest testaments to the resiliency of life in Maui. The turtles don’t even make it look easy. They lay on the sand protecting their soon to be hatchlings, patiently awaiting the day the new generation of green sea turtles will accompany them back into the ocean. Before that day comes the parents put on a truly inspiring show of making their way back. Revolving their flippers they wade the rocky sand, slowly inching their way to the water. When they are close enough the waves sweep them back in and they are lost to the hundreds of spectators as they swim gracefully in the shielding blue waters of Ho’okipa.  Resilience was needed on the day I arrived at Ho’okipa Beach. A heavy rainfall began almost immediately after I parked my re...

 During my brief stay in west Maui, I spotted at least three mongooses. Those aren’t good statistics for an invasive species in an island ecosystem. Like the cane toad was imported from the Americas to control insects in Australia, so the mongoose was brought over from India to the cane fields of Hawaii to exterminate rats. Both species failed in their intended mission and instead created a biological nightmare in their host countries; the mongooses devastating indigenous bird species far more than it made a dent in rat populations.  The impact was made more significant that all the sightings were during my drive to Oneloa Beach, an inviting paradox of a place, curiously calming as it is thrilling, secluded as it is popular, small as it is expansive. A place that can only exist in a closed environment like Mākena State Park. This is the ecosystem at stake. In less than a week, I visited the beach three times, that is how much it encapsulated for me everything I went to Hawaii ...

 June 30, 1764, had started out as a typical day for fourteen-year-old Jeanne Boulet. While France, her homeland, was mourning the recent loss of its Canadian colony and recovering from the bloodbath of the Seven Years War, Boulet went on with her quiet life in her family’s sheep pastures near Les Hubacs. Her mind was on the flock of sheep she cared for especially as there had been rumors of predation nearby. Boulet never returned home. Instead, she would be the first victim of the mysterious creature which would come to be known as the Beast of Gévaudan that would terrorize France for the next three years with over one hundred gruesome attacks.  Two-hundred and fifty years later there is no settled answer as to the identity of the creature that haunted the Mercoire Forest. The most common explanation is an unusually large wolf and, indeed, some accounts of its behavior reconcile with known wolf behavior. The European subspecies of Canis lupus , after all, has a far more volat...

 In December of 1916, more than six years after the death of Mark Twain, his final novel was published. Whether it was published in full remains a matter of mystery but what is known is that it had appeared throughout his later years in fragments and different versions. In its final (if not “finished”) form, The Mysterious Stranger is among Twain’s most exasperating works, painfully reminiscent of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno . It is, however, a revealing look into the mind of a grieving genius who had endured the loss of his wife and daughter and its release makes a valuable addition to Twain’s cannon.   Like the works it by Kipling and Carroll it is an episodic telling of encounters with a supernatural being visiting our world, in this case Satan, though not Satan himself…but Satan’s nephew who shares his name and arrives in 16th century Austria and tantalizes a group of young boys with shocking and often nihilistic teachings on t...

 In 2017 as part of a larger tour of Hollywood and its surroundings I took a trip p the Santa Monica Mountains to visit Will Rogers State Historic Park and joined a tour of the ranch house, polo grounds and stables. I did not know then I was seeing what would in less than a decade become lost history. By the second day of the LA wildfires the ranch house and stables were among the many cultural markers lost to the inferno. Their destruction pales in comparison to the thousands of homes destroyed, the thousands of people displaced and the lives lost. Nonetheless, the loss of what was a testament to a fascinating character, a uniquely American success story, is a blow.  Memorials and honors to Will Rogers abound west of the Mississippi. Most notable among them is the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma, near where the Will Rogers story truly begins. Rogers was born in 1879 in Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory near what the coming railway would soon influence rechr...

 Urban exploration, as the term is used by the seekers of crumbling architecture, has a distinct appeal from the more popular and not specifically named spectacle of ancient ruins. The latter offers clues to a long-vanished world, a life so abstracted from our own that any narrative assembled from the remnant pieces is fueled by speculation. Urban exploration hits closer to our shared cultural home. It offers pieces of a familiar world and a life we know. For some an abandoned urban landscape evokes specific memories but, even for those visiting the shattered remains of a once thriving location, there are enough commonalities to imagine the place at its peak with relative accuracy. Whether or not we knew the now decaying place in person we bond over the shared history, a bond formed by remnants of a shared culture, history or routine. There is a haunting bittersweetness, then, to most such spots not entirely different from visiting a cemetery or a memorial. Most abandoned areas tel...

 As customary as it may be to speak of the early deaths of artists as untimely, the case of Sam Cooke is indeed the story of a career cut short at the height of its powers. Cooke had already built a prolific career in R&B and pop by the time he was shot dead under mysterious circumstances in Los Angeles in 1964. But his posthumous release, the hauntingly beautiful “A Change is Gonna Come” hinted at the direction his musical career was headed as the Civil Rights Movement picked up steam.  Music had been in Cooke’s blood almost from an early age. Born to a Baptist minister in the Delta town of Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1931, the young Cooke was singing in the choir of his father’s church since he was six.  Before Cooke was twenty he joined the gospel group The Soul Stirrers. It was with the Soul Stirrers that Cooke’s remarkable vocal talent became recognized in such recordings as “Jesus Gave Me Water” and “End of My Journey”. Church music never fully left Cooke’s soul ...